Contemporary Health Management: Budget Preparation, Healthcare Funding, Workforce Planning, and Policy Reviews

Running head: CONTEMPORAY HEALTH MANANAGEMENT 1
Contemporary Health Management
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

CONTEMPORAY HEALTH MANANAGEMENT 2
Contemporary Health Management
QUESTION 1
The first step in budget preparation is computing a statistical budget to estimate all
upcoming activities in the next fiscal year. Each department in the clinic comes up with their
approximations for the year, which is computed. This makes it easy for the management to plan
for future operations.
The second step is computing expense budgets. This entails detailing the amount of
money expected to be spent by every department in that fiscal year. Such expenses include
supplies, salaries, among many other types of costs (Collyer, Harley & Short, 2015).
Another step involves computing revenues to determine how much the hospital expects to
receive within the fiscal year. The projected collections from patient services, other types of
operating revenues and non-operating revenues are put into consideration (World Health
Organization, 2016). Patient services include the charges charged on patients when they seek
medical attention. Operating revenues include selling of meals to employees and silver films
from x-ray films. Non-operating revenues are the contributions investors put into the business.
Another step is allocating an operational budget which is made up of expenses and
revenues. This budget lists all the anticipated sources of income and the expected expenditures
over the next fiscal year (Baiocchi & Ganuza, 2014). It profiles expenditures in terms of priority,
thereby enabling the management to prioritize their expenditure.
The last step is preparing capital budgets which entail making plans to grow its assets in
terms of new acquisitions and renovations.

CONTEMPORAY HEALTH MANANAGEMENT 3
The accounts operated by this clinic include expense account and revenues account. All
expenses are recorded in the expense account, while all revenues are recorded in the revenue
account (Barasa, Cleary, Molyneux & English, 2017). Ultimately, all these transactions are
transferred in a balance sheet to compute the financial standing at the end of the fiscal year. The
balance sheet helps to determine the financial position of the business in a given period and
whether it makes a profit or not.
QUESTION 2
In Australia, healthcare is primarily funded by the government. For instance, in 2013-
2014 alone, the government spent about 68% of the total $155 billion, which accounts for about
9.8% of Australia's total GDP (Collyer, Harley & Short, 2015). The different levels of
government fund healthcare activities in public and private hospitals to ensure that citizens get
the best healthcare services. The government does this through the federal initiatives such as
paying salaries to medical staff, and financing hospitals run by the state. State programs such as
healthcare initiatives, ambulance services, and public hospitals are all aimed at reducing costs to
make medical care cheaply accessible to the citizens.
Another approach involves donations from non-governmental organizations and
contributions through the health insurance system. NGOs such as the Red Cross, National Health
and Medical Research Council are all involved directly. Red Cross Blood Services donate blood
and conduct medical imaging while NHMRC is involved in funding medical and health research
and policy development (Haas & Gajdošová, 2015).
Health insurance is an approach that relieves many patients of their money. High-income
earners are taxed by the government to fund Medicare so that the disadvantaged in the society